INDIANAPOLIS — Muscle Milk Pickett Racing will sit out the next two rounds of the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship at Long Beach and Laguna Seca to focus on reliability and performance testing with its ORECA Nissan.

With only five weeks between receiving their new car and the start of the season at Daytona in February, the team has lacked development time.

Having ran P1 cars on Michelin tires the past few years, the team is faced with a lot of new elements in 2014: a new car, a new prototype class and new Continental tires, a brand not only new to the team but also to the ORECA 03 LMP2 prototype.

“It’s never an easy decision to make when deciding to miss a race, let alone two,” said team owner Greg Pickett. “We had an issue at Sebring with the power steering that could have been a safety concern, fortunately it didn’t get to that but we want to make sure that we don’t have such problems again.

“It was a very short off-season for us, we received our car at the end of December and we were racing at the end of January. The team worked hard so we could be at Daytona and Sebring but we feel that we need to take a step back in order to continue moving forward the way we want.”

Muscle Milk Pickett Racing will return to action at the Raceway at Belle Isle Park May 30-31 for the Detroit Grand Prix.

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